Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 54

by John Joseph Adams

  In terms of evil business practices, there’s this really funny line in the book about how Bob doesn’t want to use a Kindle, because he says there are scary implications—darker, esoteric implications—to spending too much time staring at a device controlled by a secretive billionaire in Seattle.

  Well, yeah. Don’t get me started on Amazon. I’m a novelist. I’m published by Hachette. My books have been blocked and blacklisted by Amazon on multiple occasions. I’m not bitter. I just got my own back in fiction.

  But people could go check out your blog post, “Amazon: Malignant Monopoly or Just Plain Evil?”

  Absolutely. Also, I did a blog entry a couple of years back on understanding or deconstructing Amazon’s business model. Most people are a bit wonkish about the economics of how it works and what Amazon is trying to accomplish. Let’s just say, they want to be a monopoly as much as Google or Facebook want to be a monopoly, and if they get their way, it’s going to be a pretty scary contingency, because the internet as we know it will no longer exist.

  Since these are spy thriller books, I think one of the biggest things you have to take into consideration is the Edward Snowden case and all the revelations that have come out about the NSA spying on citizens. How has that affected the ecosystem for writing spy thriller novels?

  It’s probably having a deeply insidious effect. It will take longer to work its way though than the collapse of the Soviet Union, but be even more shattering. For a couple of years after 1989, there were a queue of already-sold techno-thrillers of the plot about World War Three in Europe through the Soviet Union and NATO. You can just see the authors tearing their hair out as the books come rolling out two years after the Warsaw Pact collapsed. You can imagine how their sales stunk. I think we may be seeing a much more subtle effect on the spy thriller today from the Snowden revelations.

  What has happened is a massively eroded public faith in not merely the ability to function of the security services, but their very reason for existing. Now, I began writing the Laundry series in 1999, and back then, the whole Snowden thing wasn’t even on the radar, nor was 9/11 on the radar. In mid 2001, I handed the manuscript of The Atrocity Archives to my editor at this small, Scottish SF magazine, Spectrum SF, and he worked on editing it, and then in November 2001, I got an email from him, saying, “You know, Charlie, I know you’re looking for a bunch of mad terrorists who are going to attack the United States and summon up something really horrible in Santa Cruz, California, but do you think you could find somebody a bit more obscure than Osama Bin Ladin and Al Qaeda?” I’d gone looking for crazies who were likely to attack the United States in 1999, and who was at the top of the list but Al Qaeda? And yet, it was totally unforeseeable that two years later they would be so well recognized and infamous everywhere.

  The same sort of thing has happened with the Snowden revelations, and confirmation of what a lot of people suspected all along about the scope of bugging by the NSA, or their British equivalent, the GCHQ. This stuff has been suspected by professional paranoids for decades. It’s just that it’s now coming out in the public domain, and everybody’s seeing smoking guns on every mantelpiece and seeing confirmation. Now, I’m not sure how to actually address this in the Laundry series yet—I’m still digesting it. What I can say is I’m working on a different near-future techno-thriller/spy-thriller trilogy set in my Merchant Princes universe, with publication in about a year to eighteen months, that is my definitive post-Edward Snowden spy thriller, but that’s not really the subject of this podcast interview.

  Actually, I do want to talk about those books a little bit, but before we get to that, on this subject, you had a blog post about why there won’t be a third Halting State book, because stuff you were predicting keeps coming true.

  Not so much “it keeps coming true.” The real reason there isn’t going to be one now—oh, okay. Shortly after I wrote that blog entry, I had a blinding flash of light, a moment of revelation, and the plot for the third Halting State book landed in my brain. So much for saying “I’m not gonna write one.”

  However, there’s a different reason for not writing one at present, which is what I describe to people as the Scottish Political Singularity. At this point, Scotland is going through a political singularity. So, the current Halting State will basically be shelved for a couple of years, until the dust has settled.

  You previously had to shelve a concept for a third Halting State book because it turned out the NSA was spying on World of Warcraft players.

  No, not quite. What happened was I postponed the second book in the series for a year in a half, because I was about to start writing in 2007, when the banking system went crazy. The original plot for that novel, which came out of Rule 34, it was originally going to be titled 419 and it was about the world’s largest Nigerian advanced defraud. A bunch of scammers were basically going to steal from the World Bank, the European Union, the US Treasury—a sum roughly on the order of $20–$30 billion—by faking the existence of an entire central Asian republic.

  Then, the banking system goes sideways and from the wreckage crawls Bernie Madoff, and everybody wants to know where the $50 billion he’s stolen has gone. Bernie Madoff basically blew away that cloth. At that point, I just could not write that book anymore. A different one surfaced instead.

  It is very, very difficult, trying to write plausible near-future science fiction, within fifteen years of the present day. The problem is that the world we live in is undergoing really weird convulsions every couple of years. Also, the near future … You’re going to recognize that it’s ninety percent intimately familiar. Ninety percent of the buildings are there—we’re living in them. Ninety percent of the cars are already on the road. Ninety percent of the people are alive. About nine percent of it is new, but predictable. We can look at various plans on file with city authorities—what skyscrapers are going up in the next couple of years. We can look at Intel’s road map to see where their chips are going to be in five years. And then there’s the one percent that nobody can predict, because it’s just too blindingly weird.

  Nobody in 2000 was predicting 9/11. Nobody in 1990 was seriously predicting universal uptake of the World Wide Web. Everybody around 2004 was thinking smartphones were the way forward, but the idea that Apple would be the dominant player in that space, that they’d have these huge, high-resolution screens linked to the sum total of human knowledge, and that we’d be using them to watch silly cat videos—it would not make any kind of sense in any kind of realistic near-future prediction anyone could make. So, writing near-future SF has almost become a dying art. There’s very few people doing it these days. And, if I seem to falter or throw my hands up in despair every so often and just say “No, I can’t go there,” it’s because it is actually quite a hard game to do.

  You mentioned that these upcoming Merchant Prince books are going to be your definitive statement—or at least, your latest statement—on the Edward Snowden situation. Do you want to talk about what the latest news is with that series?

  The previous series was set in 2002 to 2003, and it started out … It was actually a bait-and-switch. It started out looking like a secondary world fantasy—a portal fantasy—where a person from our world finds themselves in a fantasy land and tried to make a path for themselves, only rather than playing it as fantasy, I played it as science fiction, particularly in the realist mode.

  Our protagonist finds herself in a quasi-medieval setting, and does not particularly wish to succumb to the fate that is common to women living in a crapsack world medieval setting, so she tries to disrupt it. Unfortunately, she succeeds, and when you disrupt something, it has consequences, some of which are pretty damn unpleasant. By book six, or book three of the new, revised omnibus edition, large numbers of mushroom clouds are floating around, because one of the side-effects of economic disruption is she accidentally starts a couple of nuclear wars, by not realizing just how much is at stake.

  Now, the new series picks up the thread about sevente
en years later, in a couple of different timelines. On the one hand, we have the United States that was traumatized in 2003, when the Bush White House was nuked by extradimensional narco-terrorists. The Department of Homeland Security in this universe has pretty much turned the US into a police state. They’ve been given responsibility for protecting the nation from threats from all possible parallel universes, and we’re talking a level of surveillance in everyday life that is at least on a par with what you get in any given airline concourse these days. Don’t even ask what happens at airports.

  And they are indeed becoming quite worried, because they know that the Merchant Princes, the narco-terrorists who can travel between timelines, some of them are still out there. They know there may be other civilizations out there. They’re afraid of what will happen if they make contact with another para-time-capable civilization who learn how they dealt with the first people they met, namely, lots of B-52s.

  Over the course of this trilogy, the sum of all fears is going to happen. They’re gonna make contact with another para-time-capable North American superpower, only it’s not called The United States of America. I don’t want to give too much away about it, except that, well, post-Edward Snowden, it’s about the tension between omniscient surveillance and actual, real security, which is not the same thing at all.

  Back in Episode Sixty-One, we interviewed Paul Krugman, and he really had a lot of great things to say about the economics in that series. Are the new books going to deal with economics, too, or is it going to be more to do with the politics and espionage sort of stuff?

  There are economic issues in it, but they’re very much backgrounded. The problem is, I’ve spent so many years noodling around with the ideas of this series in my head that trying to cram everything into a trilogy of relatively short books—basically, something the size of a single Neal Stephenson doorstop—is forcing me to skimp on some of the fine details I worked out. On the other hand, we’ve got a term for that in science fiction, it’s called “Here. I’ve done all my homework. Now you can suffer for my art.” I’m not going to force the readers to suffer through it just for that.

  When we interviewed Paul Krugman, he talked about how you did a panel together at WorldCon. I was curious if you’ve kept in touch at all or …

  Not with any great frequency. We’ve seen each other occasionally, but that’s about it. He’s a very, very busy man, and I live somewhere that’s fairly remote in travel terms.

  One thing that really interested me about the Merchant Princes series is the basic premise of characters who can walk between parallel worlds is sort of inspired by Roger Zelazny’s Amber series. I saw you say on Reddit that if you could hang out for a day with a deceased science fiction author, you would choose Roger Zelazny. It’s actually who I would choose as well. Could you say why that would be your choice?

  Zelazny was a master stylist. He raised the bar for a lot of people trying to write science fiction in the late ‘60s to early ‘70s. He was still writing cutting-edge material right up to his untimely death due to lung cancer. He wasn’t very old when he died, and it just seems like missed opportunity to me. I did actually have an opportunity to do dinner with him once, for a convention committee in 1989, and didn’t make the effort to get to town at that time, and it was about six months later that he died of lung cancer. So there is an element of personal nostalgia there for roads not taken. But also, I believe he’d be quite a fascinating guy to talk to.

  Just imagine what he would have to say about all the new media and the stuff that’s happened since 1996.

  Well, for that, you’d have to posit he was keeping up to date on it. One thing to bear in mind is, by now, he’d be in his sixties to seventies, and, as Douglas Adams put it, “Any technology that existed when I was born has been there forever. Anything that comes along before you’re thirty-six is new and fascinating and important and useful. Anything invented after you’re thirty-six is new, incomprehensible, and annoying.”

  There’s a Laundry pen-and-paper role-playing game. I was wondering what your experience with that has been. Have players told you stories about things that have happened to them in the game?

  I try to keep it at arm’s length to some extent, because I believe it has developed some sort of subculture and fandom. I don’t want to run the risk of meddling in something that I don’t, myself, play, and disrupting other people’s scenarios or gameplay, and at the same time, I don’t want to run the risk of being accused of plagiarism from other people’s ideas. So, it’s something I try to keep a reasonable distance from. I stay in touch with Cubicle 7, who writes the games, to make sure that they’re up-to-date about what I’m planning with the series and where I’m going to take it, but I don’t want to tread on their toes too hard.

  You did used to be pretty involved in role-playing games, right? I saw that you wrote some of the monsters for the Fiend Folio.

  In my mid-teens. I haven’t really been a role-player since I was about twenty, and that’s more decades ago than I care to think about.

  It said that you added the githyanki to the Fiend Folio, which was based on George R. R. Martin’s Dying of the Light novel.

  That was actually a throwaway of his, as far as I can tell, in his first novel from the mid-seventies. You’re going back a long way, here.

  Sorry, but what was the connection between his novel and the …

  I basically took the name and ran with it for this species of extra-temporal alien horrors for Dungeons and Dragons back in the day. In the late seventies. I was looking for a name, and George R. R. Martin has always been pretty good with names.

  But, you’re saying, in that novel it doesn’t really flesh out what they are—that you basically just took the name.

  I took the name, yes, rather than any detail.

  Speaking of George R. R. Martin, on Twitter, @nottimothy asks you, “How’s it feel playing George R. R. Martin with your characters?”

  It feels good. Basically, when you have too many characters in a serious story arc, if you kill a whole bunch of them off, it does two things. Firstly, it makes your job as a writer much, much easier. You’ve got less stuff to keep track of. Secondly, it keeps the readers on their toes and emotionally engaged. They can never be too certain that the hero or heroine they’re rooting for is still going to be alive in the next book. Now, it’s a card you’ve got to play very carefully. Absolutely never kill off a major character without at least thinking through the consequences, and also how the readers will respond to it. But there are times when it is necessary in a series, and in particular—I shouldn’t give any spoilers away, but it would probably be fair to describe the climax of The Rhesus Chart as being the Laundry series’ Red Wedding.

  We actually have a bunch of Twitter questions for you, not all of which I understand.

  Okay.

  This one is from Chip Salzenberg. He says, “Does Bob Howard use Perl?”

  I think Bob Howard is recent enough to use Python instead. There’s your answer.

  Okay. William @phenidone says, “Is Turing completeness a sufficient condition for possession? What about a Magic: the Gathering card deck? Cue Alanis Morissette.”

  Yup. Turing completeness is sufficient, and thereon probably hangs another Laundry series story or two.

  I’m not sure that this makes sense to people who haven’t read the books.

  It probably doesn’t. The books have a very, very geeky audience.

  Yeah. Well, I guess people will just have to read the books if they want to understand.

  Something you haven’t mentioned at all in The Rhesus Chart is a really, really extended series of set piece jokes all about a programming/software engineering methodology called Scrum Programming, which I think most non-programmers have missed. Those people who’ve been involved in Scrum seem to read the whole thing rolling on the floor laughing.

  Adam Shea asks—this might be a spoiler, I don’t know—“Is Howard still susceptible to K Syndrome, and is Howard sti
ll human, or is he more hungry ghost + meat puppet now?”

  That’s a spoiler.

  Yeah, I figured. Back in Episode 106, we interviewed Karl Schroeder. He was talking about all the potential applications of block chain technology—the technology behind bitcoin. I know that you wrote a very anti-bitcoin blog post, and I was just wondering if you were familiar with the kind of stuff that he was talking about, and what you think of it.

  My position on bitcoin isn’t about crypto-currencies per se, or about the block chain technology. It’s about the ideology implicit in the way bitcoin has been implemented, which looks to me as if it was designed by Libertarians with the goal of undermining conventional currencies, which have an intimate, deep-rooted relationship with the nation-state itself. It looks like a system that was designed to corrode the primary economy, and, in many respects, make it difficult to tax. That’s the problem I’ve got with bitcoin. I am not, shall we say, an anti-statist anarchist.

  Karl was talking about how smart contracts using the block-chain technology might be replacing lawyers within a matter of months. Do you have any opinions on that kind of thing?

  I think that’s a little bit optimistic. I think that lawyers are going be here for a very long time to come. That’s not to say that they’re not being automated and their numbers are reduced in many ways. The demand for the individual numbers of lawyers is dropping like a stone, because a lot of the jobs that used to go to newly qualified lawyers—research jobs in law libraries—are now being automated thanks to searching. But that doesn’t mean that actual practicing lawyers who do stuff in court and deal in contracts are going away. The future of law is an interesting question.